Among other changes to student routine during the 2025 fall school year, Oak Park and River Forest High School began to transition from the use of physical to digital hall passes.

“There’s a few reasons why we started using digital passes,” said Kristen Devitt, the director of campus safety. “Written passes were not always doing what we wanted them to do. A piece of paper can’t keep track of how long you’re supposed to be out of a room and when you’re supposed to go back.” 

Devitt also attested to the fact that “it’s easy to forge a pass,” and said that digital passes will ensure trust within the school community. Also, Devitt noted the costly environmental impact of the thousands of printed passes. 

Passionate about human impact on the environment, environmental science teacher Kelsey Kaiser said, “I’d much rather not have paper passes.” Additionally, she appreciates how assigning digital passes is “much faster for me and less disruptive to my flow.” Kaiser also mentioned how user-friendly the application, Minga, is, and how easy it was to adjust to.

ID scanning and digital hall passes are both monitored through Minga. According to Devitt, when students ask for a hall pass, teachers will assign the pass through the Minga application and students are expected to carry their student ID in the halls. The system works randomly, depending on who students encounter. Campus safety may stop a student and search their ID number by accessing Minga on tablets.

A new feature of the digital passes is time limits, most of which are between five and 10 minutes.

“As long as the time limit is reasonable, I think that the digital passes work fine,” senior Dom Santos said. Santos agrees with the digital pass transition, describing the changes as “very helpful.” As a user of the gender-neutral bathrooms, he said that “it gets frustrating having to wait for someone in the bathroom who’s sitting in there and skipping class.” Santos said that the digital passes will help ensure that students are where they say they will be and “puts disciplinary action in place” when needed.

According to Devitt, OPRF administrations started conversations about switching to ID scanning and digital passes last year. Towards the end of the school year, faculty was looking at different applications that could be used and began beta testing the following summer.  

“There was a long period of research in making sure that it was going to do what we wanted it to do,” Devitt said, as administrators were looking for a workable application  “that could do multiple things for [campus safety] and be able to give [them] the information that [they] needed.”

Devitt said that these are “baby steps” and that administrators are just at the “beginning stages of being able to collect data and understand how this is impacting our climate in the building.” 

Once digital passes are fully implemented, she anticipates that they “would be looking for feedback from faculty, staff and students on how this has been working and if there’s any problem or changes that could be made to make it better.”